A council of rural Victorian healthcare providers has signed on with Cisco to wire up new virtualisation and teleconferencing services to support its IT and e-health operations.

The South West Alliance of Rural Health (SWARH) is comprised of over 15 facilities over 60,000 square kilometres in rural Victoria, and has teamed up with Cisco and Dimension Data to deploy the teleconferencing company's new Virtualisation Experience Infrastructure offering (VXI) to improve communication and patient care.

VXI sees an endpoint device deployed next to a virtualised PC that optimises videoconferencing and reduces load on the datacentre.

Barwon Health, the largest member of the rural health alliance, will be the first to deploy VXI to its clinicians. CEO of Barwon Health, Paul Cohen, described it as a "significant investment" in healthcare tech.

"Barwon Health has agreed to deploy components of Cisco Virtualisation Experience Infrastructure to help ensure that clinicians can obtain the best experience possible when using technology to assist them in the delivery of critical patient care. This is a significant investment to create a more resilient and predictable working environment," said Cohen.

David Hanrahan, general manager Virtualisation Data Centre for Dimension Data Australia said that his company is happy to be on-board.

"The SWARH VXI implementation is a great example of the move to address the needs of increasingly mobile users through high performance, centralised infrastructure. Dimension Data's wide-ranging expertise across multiple vendor technologies, from the network to the desktop, will provide SWARH with end-to-end integration and reduced project risk.

"We are very pleased to again be at the forefront of the convergence of technologies from leading vendors, such as Cisco, in the desktop virtualisation space," Hanrahan said.